THE CLIENT

Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) has been creating and delivering innovative medicines that enable people to live longer, healthier and more active lives since 1876. The company manufactures and distributes its products through owned or leased facilities in the United States, Puerto Rico, and 28 other countries and is sold in approximately 160 countries.

® ReoPro (abciximab, Centocor) is a cardiovascular drug pro-vided by Eli Lilly that prevents blood platelets from clotting following certain heart procedures, such as angioplasty. ReoPro Europe has 110 employees across Europe and more than USD 100 million in annual revenue. Lilly began marketing Reopro in the 1990's and despite new competition, ReoPro solidified its best-in-class performance.

THE CHALLENGE

In 1999, the management of Eli Lilly Europe realized that in order to sustain their growth Lilly Europe needed to increase the speed and efficiency of knowledge flow within the organization, as well as with their clients, customers and partners. Especially for complex medicines like ReoPro, the main success factor in the market is the speed and accuracy of the knowledge transfer and the way the organization communicates and co-works with hospitals and partners.

Lilly Europe decided to set up a separate European business unit for ReoPro. The management began searching for a way to extend the benefits of e-collaboration and the internet to its customers and inside the organization in order to improve the capturing, distribution and creation of knowledge within their geographically distributed teams

“We have always thought about what would be the smartest way to go about our business and now, together with the people of Colayer, we are running important paths of information through the internet enabling us to have a new quality of inter-action and discussion with our customers, a quality in which we are able to respond online in the shortest time possible from anywhere in the world.”

Juergen Raths
MD - Critical Care Europe, Eli Lilly
PROPOSITION & IMPLEMENTATION

Colayer/metalayer functional integration and personalization capabilities prompted Lilly to select the Colayer/metalayer platform to create and power Xiprean.com, an intra and extra enterprise collaboration platform. By March 2000, the management introduced the Xiprean.com portal - a community network across their extended enterprise.


SPEED TRANSPARENCY AND TRUST

Xiprean.com started as the REOpro community portal for the EuroPEAN market and has been rolled out one year later to the entire Critical Care Europe organization. Xiprean.com now also powers the team of xigris, oncology and all teams of the hospital products of Eli Lilly Europe. Xiprean.com has developed to the common workplace of the extended organization, currently hosting over 100 active communities and 500 users. Xiprean.com is not only the web portal but it is a virtual organization where people across the enterprise meet, discuss and implement solution collaboratively in real time or asynchronously.

There are different communities for sales projects and initiatives, for management to make strategic decisions, for managing human resources, for product knowledge discussions, content support. These are used within the enterprise as well as with partners, suppliers and selected customers. The portal is also extensively used for organizing events and hosting online meetings and presentations.

THE COLLABORATIVE WORKPLACE

Xiprean.com gives Critical Care an environment in which their sales teams across Europe collaborate and share knowledge. This enables the organization to assemble the "best-fit" teams, efficiently applying resources for events and campaigns, regardless of the contributor's geographic location. The knowledge flow across this network enables the sales team to be updated continuously and also gives them instant access to any information required at any point of time. The constant interaction and discussion with co-employees, experts and partners has provided a speed that could never be realized with conventional modes of communication.

The Xiprean Community Portal provides for each employee a personalized workplace, enabling the distribution of information to co-employees, suppliers, partners and selected customers via Colayer/ metalayer XML/XSLT based Collaboration Platform. The cross-collaborative workspace has fostered trust among the various groups within the extended enterprise. People across Critical Care are now exchanging more of their know ledge, working together and evolving a new work culture of collaboration and co-learning, no matter where they are located geographically.

The portal is powered by advanced collaborative features which are very intuitive and simple to use. With features like News, Discussion, Files, Virtual Meeting, Q&A, Questionnaires, Forms, Multimedia and other collaborative portal tools. Critical Care has also managed to save on processing costs, thus achieving efficiency, speed and cost effectiveness at the same time. The portal also provides an effective monitoring tool for the intangible assets by providing reports on context driven interactions and comty specific statistics.

“The Colayer/metalayer platform has become our central communication tool. We really have gained SPEED which becomes more and more the determining factor in our ability to be in close relationship with our stakeholders. And the platform gives us a documentation of work in progress which provides the management with a never known TRANSPARENCY.”

 

Juergen Raths

MD - Critical Care Europe, Eli Lilly
OUTLOOK

Xiprean.com has become an essential and business critical platform for the Critical Care Europe organization, for their partners and customers. The organization has started sponsoring and promoting "mednetwork.org", a Colayer/ metalayer powered comty hub targeting medical experts and hospitals throughout Europe. mednetwork.org provides a platform for the knowledge exchange of the medical community and provides a broad range of tools, like web forms for studies and trial data collection, real or non real time web streaming, Virtual meeting facilities, Discussion and Knowledge Q&A databases, a Virtual Library, Study comparison tools etc.

In the knowledge intensive Pharmaceutical industry maximizing potential returns on investments requires seamless communication and knowledge transfer between internal and external teams, diligent project management, and sharing increasing amounts of mission critical knowledge collaboratively to all relevant players.

“The Critical Care organization doesn't have a portal -Xiprean.com is our organization. Once an organization runs all major communication over a community portal, and once an organization stores all relevant knowledge on the communities -the portal becomes the organization.”

Juergen Raths
MD - Critical Care Europe, Eli Lilly

© Colayer May 04

“In the next couple of months, we will expand Xiprean.com and mednetwork.org in all directions -we are moving more products and businesses on the platform, we are expanding the layer to our partners and suppliers and we are building up strong networks with our customers on mednetwork.org. In a couple of months, global relationships within and outside the company will be managed on different layers.”

Juergen Raths
MD - Critical Care Europe, Eli Lilly